Land registry: and another thing

May 27, 2016

The Land Registry privatisation consultation closed last night at quarter to midnight. So I had a quick look yesterday evening to see if I’d had the acknowledgement which I’d asked for by ticking the relevant box on the response form and explicitly in the covering email. I hadn’t.

On the principle of “it’s probably me”, I had a quick look to make sure I’d sent it to the right email address…

…and I found a curious thing.

If you look at the covering page for the consultation on gov.uk you will see you were directed to send your responses to lr.consultation@ukgi.gov.uk

(The page has now been changed to show the consultation as closed, and, dammit, I didn’t think to take a screenprint.)

But the consultation document itself gives the response address as lr.consultation@ukgi.gsi.gov.uk. Party, brewery anyone? I tweeted about it before the deadline (just!) I also wrote to the consultation coordinator at BIS (named in the condoc) last night and asked for assurance that both email addresses are live and that everyone who responded will have their responses considered – watch this space.

The addresses are interesting, though. I did wonder about the “ukgi” element, thinking perhaps that the civil service had moved to a new provider and that instead of “gsi” the format would now be “ukgi” – but that didn’t make sense when you had an address which had both “ukgi” AND “gsi” in it. The usual format of civil service email addresses is firstname.surname@dept.gsi.gov.uk

…and so I looked again at the condoc. Which says it is produced by BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, on the face of the document. But on the consultation website, it’s listed as a production